December 02, 2014

"Quick tips on giving research presentations"

So, if I have any general advice on presentations, let me give it here.

1. As always, think ahead of time about your goals and your audience.

2. When you start your talk, make your goals clear.

3. If you are given X minutes to talk, you may well have more than X minutes worth of stuff to say. That’s fine. Spend .8X minutes on your material and the final .2X minutes explaining how this fits in with the other stuff you don’t have time to say.

4. If you’re talking about your research, make your contributions clear. It’s not about bragging rights, it’s about making it clear to the audience why they should be listening to you on this topic.

5. Fractality: Every piece of your talk should contain all of it. OK, not really, but the key point is that most people won’t be paying attention all the time. So if someone tunes in at some random point in the talk, they should be able to follow along from that point. People always give the advice to start broad and then drill deep—and I agree, that’s good advice—but when you’re drilling deep, keep sending soundings out to the surface to remind people why you’re doing all this.

There’s lots of other good advice:
– Don’t put so many words on your slides; instead, write down some notes and say what you want to say.
– Move around, don’t stand still.
– If you have slides and they are displayed at a reachable height, stand in front of them and point at them with your hands. If instead you stand somewhere else (for example, wherever your computer happens to be), the trouble is that people in the audience won’t know whether to look at you (where the sound is coming from) or at the slides.
– If you know anyone—anyone—in the audience, plant a question or two. This isn’t “cheating,” it’s just a way to get the post-talk question period to go more smoothly.
– And here’s what Hal Stern told me before I presented my first professional talk: Don’t try to blow them away, it’s enough to just present what you did. If it’s good stuff, it can stand up unadorned and a discerning audience will realize its importance. And if it’s not good stuff, you shouldn’t be wasting people’s time on it anyway.

I could keep going but I think points 1 through 5 above are the most important.

You are never too old to get advice on presentations. At the SEA meetings, on the panel titled "top ten tips for young economists," and after Jill Caviglia-Harris gave her talk on research presentations, I had a 20 minute presentation ready for a 15 minute talk. I had to flip through about 5 slides with nothing to say but "I'm running out of time."

Comments

So, if I have any general advice on presentations, let me give it here.

1. As always, think ahead of time about your goals and your audience.

2. When you start your talk, make your goals clear.

3. If you are given X minutes to talk, you may well have more than X minutes worth of stuff to say. That’s fine. Spend .8X minutes on your material and the final .2X minutes explaining how this fits in with the other stuff you don’t have time to say.

4. If you’re talking about your research, make your contributions clear. It’s not about bragging rights, it’s about making it clear to the audience why they should be listening to you on this topic.

5. Fractality: Every piece of your talk should contain all of it. OK, not really, but the key point is that most people won’t be paying attention all the time. So if someone tunes in at some random point in the talk, they should be able to follow along from that point. People always give the advice to start broad and then drill deep—and I agree, that’s good advice—but when you’re drilling deep, keep sending soundings out to the surface to remind people why you’re doing all this.

There’s lots of other good advice:
– Don’t put so many words on your slides; instead, write down some notes and say what you want to say.
– Move around, don’t stand still.
– If you have slides and they are displayed at a reachable height, stand in front of them and point at them with your hands. If instead you stand somewhere else (for example, wherever your computer happens to be), the trouble is that people in the audience won’t know whether to look at you (where the sound is coming from) or at the slides.
– If you know anyone—anyone—in the audience, plant a question or two. This isn’t “cheating,” it’s just a way to get the post-talk question period to go more smoothly.
– And here’s what Hal Stern told me before I presented my first professional talk: Don’t try to blow them away, it’s enough to just present what you did. If it’s good stuff, it can stand up unadorned and a discerning audience will realize its importance. And if it’s not good stuff, you shouldn’t be wasting people’s time on it anyway.

I could keep going but I think points 1 through 5 above are the most important.

You are never too old to get advice on presentations. At the SEA meetings, on the panel titled "top ten tips for young economists," and after Jill Caviglia-Harris gave her talk on research presentations, I had a 20 minute presentation ready for a 15 minute talk. I had to flip through about 5 slides with nothing to say but "I'm running out of time."

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